In Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time, you play as an anonymous Prince battling his way through a zombie-ridden palace. While almost all of the adventure takes place inside an oriental castle, you will go through a wide variety of environments, from luxurious gardens to sinister caves: the cartoonish art direction still holds up well and the overall atmosphere is magical. The writing is also good, with solid narration, likable characters (Farah: best deuteragonist ever!), fun dialogues, and a few neat twists.
Like the original PoP, Sands of Time's gameplay heavily relies on platforming sections, but this time, they're on steroids! The Prince indefatigably runs on walls, jumps at inhumane heights and performs acrobatics: the controls are solid, and each of these sections feels like a puzzle you must solve using an awesome set of moves. In general, they're also integrated credibly in the environments, often resulting in great set pieces.
At the core of the game is an artifact called the Dagger of Time, which gives you access to a bunch of cool powers, like Max Payne-styled slow-mo, magical attacks, but most importantly, “rewinding” time for a few seconds, allowing you to correct your mistakes! It's a bit gimmicky, but an interesting mechanic nonetheless.
So, we have an awesome atmosphere, quality storytelling, fun and innovative gameplay... and in fact, Sands of Time would be almost perfect if it wasn't for its combat system. You get constantly trapped in arenas, trying to dispatch wave after wave of foes. They often have high health, can parry your attacks, and can only be destroyed with a finishing move: fighting them quickly becomes tedious due to a bad camera and rather limited set of attacks. It's not really hard since you can always rewind time when in trouble, just tedious and not very fun.
If you can get past this, you still have a fantastic little game that somewhat shows its age, while still feeling fun to play, as well as refined in its world-building!